


Hand in Hand

by vinnie2757



Category: Gorillaz
Genre: 2d is a mess but you should expect that by now, Explicit Language, Gen, Hell is a place and it is not very nice, Major Character Injury, hell everybodys a mess by now, his character development is swinging the other way to plastic beach, murdoc being a grown up and not a piece of shit is a terrifying thing, murdoc is about to begin a redemption arc, some non-canon compliant things esp regarding murdoc's childhood and venture into satanism, spot the good omens reference, there are a few unfortunate implications, trigger for being buried alive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-13 02:52:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3364988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He made a promise to her many years ago when the nightmares kept them both awake, that if anything happened, he’d come. He’d save her, no matter what. He promised. </p><p>When she calls, he makes good on that promise.</p><p>And so Murdoc enters Hell, soul be damned.</p><p>[AU of what happened to Noodle and/or Hell, and the incident in Beirut.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hand in Hand

**Author's Note:**

> I've done my best to put the warnings in the tags, but if I missed one, let me know please. I also, immediately after posting, realised I should have separated it, and then people agreed with me. So I split it into two chapters. That said, enjoy my lovelies~!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Murdoc goes to Hell.

_“I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”_

**Winston Churchill**

Getting into Hell is easy. It is so easy he’s surprised there isn’t just a large doorway with a neon sign above it like some seedy strip club a few streets down from the _Drinkers’ World_ he’s grown rather fond of. They don’t make much of a fuss about him going in at all hours and buying _far_ more than is legal.

He’s not sure at this point if it’s a perk of being famous or his face just has that Look about it. Stu says that it’s his face, but Stu doesn’t know shit.

Still, he takes to Hell like he takes to everything else; with very little patience and an absolutely flagrant disregard to anything remotely resembling grace.

He shoulders his way through the queue, causing a domino of half-dressed old priests who howl curses that would make his father blush, shoves past a bunch of rowdy middle-aged men who start pushing and shoving each other, each a head taller than him, and wearing far more studs and leather than they should with those bellies. There is a brief pause in his stride, but he _has_ to pause, it’s a moral imperative. When you pass Hitler on the queue into Hell, you _have_ to punch him in the face. There’s a law somewhere, he’s sure.

 _Centuries_ must pass before he’s anywhere remotely near the front of the queue. In reality, what little of it there is in this bedlam of a millennia-old queue filled with some of the foulest smelling pissants in the history of all things glorious and evil, he’s probably not even a third of the way through, a quarter, a fifth. Bollocks to it.

It doesn’t matter, though, because he can hear his name being called. For a second, for one ridiculous, uncharacteristically hopeful second, he thinks it’s Noodle.

But no, no, she doesn’t know his full name, she doesn’t know the utter joke that is his official identification.

The roaring increases in volume. He sighs, turns.

Beelzebub is stood there looking rather unimpressed with him. Murdoc returns the look with equal apathy, but where there is an oddly parental disappointment to the demon’s many eyes, Murdoc has the tightness around his of someone still clenching their fist tight enough to cut their palm.

‘Walk with me, Murdoc,’ Beelzebub says, waving a hand. A separate path appears.

Murdoc glares at it. He considers setting fire to it. But everything is on fire down here.

‘Piss on it later,’ Beelzebub snorts, and sets off down the path, a lumbering mass of rotting skin and dragging bone. ‘Come.’

Heaving a breath, and wishing he’d punched Hitler twice, Murdoc follows. For several long minutes that he feels could have been better spent stood behind those priests talking about the little boy they’d fucked to death however long ago, they walk in silence. It’s an agonising sort of silence, one not unlike the rash-like pauses at Kong, the ones that made Murdoc want to claw his skin off just get to 2D to look at him.

‘What happened to my body?’ Murdoc blurts out, and Beelzebub jerks, as if he’d forgotten the man was there. A boy, really, in the grand scheme of things.

 ‘They gave you a nice burial,’ Beelzebub tells him.

He waves a hand; an A4 manila folder at least several inches thick and bound by twine appears on it. A lesser man would never be able to hold it. Beelzebub is not a man, and he idly leafs through several chunks of parchment before settling on a hastily-scrawled note in green biro on the back of a receipt from Tesco.

‘Ah, yes, a Mister Stuart Tusspot – ‘

Murdoc grumbles something.

‘Pardon?’

‘His name is Pot,’ Murdoc repeats, louder.

Beelzebub leafs through some more papers, finds a birth certificate. He hums, considering.

‘His dad changed it ‘fore he was born,’ Murdoc offers. ‘It _was_ Tusspot. But not now.’

‘Hm. We’ll have to update the records. Well, either way, our sources tell us that Mister Stuart _Pot_ gave you a rather nice eulogy.’

Murdoc snorts. ‘Oh, aye?’

Beelzebub hums and leafs some more. Murdoc has to jump over a flaming hole in the path, and barely makes it. He scrabbles for purchase on the stone; Beelzebub scoops him up and dumps him back on his feet without looking up from the folder.

‘Ah, here we are. We have a transcript. He said. Oh, this was _very_ nice. What a lovely chap. Such a good boy.’

There isn’t a hint of anything other than prideful sincerity in his tone. Murdoc chews the inside of his cheek and tastes blood.

‘He called you a cunt,’ the demon tells him, ‘and he called you the most selfish, horrible man he has ever known. He says you ruined his life – you did, by the way. We have it on tape. An Astra? _Really_ , Murdoc? Anyway, he goes on to say some terribly sentimental shit about how he’ll miss you and the band and how he loves you, et cetera, et cetera.’

‘Poof,’ Murdoc grumbles, and bites his tongue. His lips twitch anyway, a little, almost-invisible tug of muscle.

It could be a grimace. They both know it’s a smile.

Beelzebub pulls him to a halt, and Murdoc shoves his hands into his pockets, slouches, waits. The fly draws a flaming square with a finger, reaches into it to the harsh joint halfway up his spindly fly-arm, clenches his fist, and pulls. With it, he drags an image. That’s pretty cool, Murdoc will admit, and mentally stores the concept. If he gets back, he’s having that CGI shit in a video. He doesn’t know how. But he will. A cool video, like _DARE_ , but keeping his Very Defined Heterosexuality intact.

The image wavers as it smoothes out the creases of Beelzebub’s fist, and settles on what Murdoc recognises, intimately, as a prison cell. He steps forward, hand half-raised. 2D sits there, head in hands, nails drawing blood in his scalp. Murdoc’s heart tightens; his arm goes numb, hand dropping to his side.

‘What happened up there?’ he asks, quiet.

Beelzebub watches him inch closer and closer to the image, to a crystal ball mirage of his – a glance at the manila folder gives little indication of what they are, but everything points to _not friends_ – as he sits awaiting his fate. The police think they set the fire at Kong deliberately, but Murdoc is dead, Noodle is gone, and Russel is missing. 2D is the only one left to question. Murdoc does not seem to remember being in the fire at the studio, does not seem to really remember dying.

The notes say that he went back in to come here, to Hell, to slip through the portal the demons had used to enter. It would be a noble action, if every other word in the man’s file wasn’t written in the venom that seeps from every pore of his body. Some days, he’s so like his mother it’s a little sad.

‘He misses you,’ Beelzebub says, instead of saying any of that, and Murdoc’s shoulders draw back. ‘You’ve gone, left him without saying goodbye. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t have you to guide him around by the hand.’

Murdoc punches the image, and it dissipates. He expected resistance, almost falls through it, and snarls as his feet find themselves.

‘Shall we continue?’ Beelzebub asks, sounding very bored of it all.

Murdoc stomps off down the path. Beelzebub follows with a buzz of wings. They walk in silence, the demon still perusing his human’s file, and Murdoc examines his hand. The scar on his palm is missing. It is only a little scar, given the wound that caused it. He stares, and stares and stares, but the white mark does not appear between his life and head lines, and he cocks his head.

‘Hm?’ Beelzebub leans over to look at what Murdoc is looking at. ‘Ah, yes. That business with the knife.’

He flips through Murdoc’s file to the appropriate printout, a detailed account of some thug trying to play the big man, trying to rob global superstars. He’d waved a knife in 2D’s face, and the stupid bastard just stood there and accepted it. Murdoc had done the grown-up, sensible thing, and grabbed the knife by the blade, yanking it from the thug’s grip. He’d thought about stabbing him with it, but Murdoc’s blood was on the blade, and that would have to be enough. Small things. Baby steps. It makes something like sadness creep along the edges of Beelzebub’s wings. They’re starting to lose their best son. There is still time for him to change. Either way, either or. He can still become anything.

Mexican prison did nothing to change him, worsening him, even, but now, there is something _off_ about the boy, something – something –

‘What was I supposed to do?’ Murdoc sniffs, and shoves his hand in his pocket. ‘Bastard was waving a knife in his face. I mean, birds are real into that facial scarring and shit. But it ain’t good publicity when he’s already looking like a god. Might ruin his face, you understand. Can’t have that.’

‘Such an altruistic soul,’ the demon hums.

Murdoc shoots him a glare that goes ignored.

If the scar isn’t there, then – he sticks a hand up the back of his shirt. No bumps on the misshapen curve of L U S T, taking pride of place on the back of his heart, bumping along his jutting spine. No prison ink. He stops walking.

Beelzebub continues several feet before realising Murdoc isn’t following.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks, as though genuinely concerned.

‘I’m not my real age,’ Murdoc growls, fists raised. He’s not sure what he’s doing with that, because he’s tried to punch Beelzebub before, and it worked about as well as punching concrete. ‘I’m not forty. How old am I, Beetle? How fucking old am I?’

Beelzebub grins at him with his many mouths, and Murdoc’s jaw sets, his feet parting.

‘Are you going to fight me, boy?’ the demon asks, jovial but cold. ‘I would very much like to see if you’ve improved.’ A pause, and then, ‘you are at your happiest.’

‘I’ve never been happy.’

‘You are _such_ a terrible liar.’

Murdoc thinks, and thinks, and thinks. Pre-Mexico, then. Pre-break up. He licks his lips, stares at some flaming geyser a mile or so away.

‘The first album,’ he murmurs, and his fists open, his palms sweating. ‘I’m thirty-two. Why? Why do that? Why?’

‘So we can systematically destroy every happy memory you possess, of course! What did you think we did here? Let you get off scot-free with a file this thick? Come now, Murdoc, I thought you knew us better. You sold your soul to me, remember? And it’s all worked out rather well for you, but you’ve been putting off our attempts to collect for some years.’

It takes a moment or three for this to really sink in, to creep like prison ink under his skin. To take root. Shit, he thinks. What happy memories? What fucking memories?

Like a punch in a gut, it comes, swamping him with warm arms and hair that smells of artificial strawberries and cigarette smoke.

‘No,’ he says, shaking his head, swallowing. ‘No, don’t you fucking dare. Don’t you fucking _dare_. Take my soul, I don’t give a rat’s arse, you can have the rotten piece of shit, but don’t you lay a hand on her.’

Beelzebub draws another square, pulls another image from the other side. Murdoc sees stripes, and cannot bear to see more than that, casts his gaze to the ground. Claws find his skull, digging into his eyelids, dragging his face up, up, up. Holding him. Forcing him to see.

He can’t hear her, can’t hear what she’s saying, but he can read her lips, see her begging his name over and over again. He knows what his name looks like on people’s mouths, has seen it a thousand times in a thousand accents. Noodle’s is no different. There isn’t a spot of blood on her, but her wrists are red-raw, blistering with the heat of the steel.

A shadows passes across her body, a shadow Murdoc has not seen since he was ten and clutching a battered old occult book to his chest, backed onto a corner of his bed.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ he tells that shadow though he knows she can’t hear him, tears himself from Beelzebub’s grip, elbows him in the thorax, and flees.

He has never been to Hell before, and never intends to return, but he knows his heart, his instincts, and he knows how to find Noodle no matter where she is. Once, before she went back to Japan, before she learnt to pronounce his name, she got lost in the supermarket, having let go of his hand and wandered off. He had not known where to begin, distracted by Russel’s squawking and crying and threats of violence, but when he’d found his feet, he’d gone straight to her, without even considering it. Noodle had allowed him to carry her the rest of the way, her nose buried in the dip of his collarbone, a soft, natural weight in his arms.

(There had been a hundred birds cooing over how hot he looked with a little girl held close, but he hadn’t listened, too busy humming the guitar notes for _Tomorrow Comes Today_ into her temple. He is not the singer 2D is, he cannot give her lullabies, but he can give her their instrument, their tunes. She had seemed to appreciate it, snuggling deeper into his chest. The birds had almost fallen over themselves. Murdoc had almost walked into Russel three times before he was sent to wait in the car.)

There is no hesitance in the way he runs, each step a bound, leaping over maggots and flaming pits and once managing to land a tuck-and-roll without making a mess of it. Imps swarm the path, fly-like and stinking of rotting meat; he kicks them out of the way, punches the ones in range, and keeps moving. A pitchfork – really, he thinks, this is _disappointing_ – catches his thigh, but he barely notices. He leaps between paths, hurling himself onto a side-road that he knows, in his bones, will lead him closer, closer, closer, take him deeper into Hell. Closer to Noodle, closer to Lilith, closer to an escape. As he scrambles to his feet, he sees the lake, grabs at an imp that’s been enthusiastically clinging to his leg for a solid minute, and it bites his fingers.

He throws it on the ground and stomps it into the dust.

Alichino tries to keep him from continuing when it becomes clear imps are as useful as papier-mâché. Murdoc reminds him that he Fucked Up with Bonturo Dati. It seems to catch Alichino off-guard, so Murdoc kicks him in the shin and legs it. He has never been particularly _strong_ , nor is he the most graceful of men, but art from adversity or whatever the bloody saying is. And Murdoc is nothing if not an artist.

He takes a flying leap to a floating rock on the lake. It’s lava. If he misses, he is fucking _dead_.

Thank fucking _Christ_ , he lands, but the rock wobbles dangerously, unstable even without his weight. Alichino screeches, nails-on-a-chalkboard and spinning tires and that one monster from that game Murdoc and 2D played once set in a haunted town, and he shudders, tries to ignore it. Another rock floats by. He leaps, and lands it, but eats shit the moment he does, tumbling and fracturing his nose a ninth-tenth-thirtieth time on the burning stone. His fall tips the stone, and he scrabbles for purchase before it dunks him.

He manages to haul himself up and balance his weight, but not before his boots lose grip and a foot plunges calf-deep into the lava. The noise he makes is no more human than anything else here, a stuck pig and a wounded silverback and white noise, but he presses on. He does not have time to stop.

His body is incorporeal here, a non-entity. Everything is psychosomatic. Everything is psychosomatic. Everything is psychosomatic. It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt, it’s a fake pain like cavities and a broken nose, it’s a pain he’s felt before, Hannibal’s fags stubbed out on his palm, his father’s knuckles grinding deep into his belly. He can do it. He _has_ to do it.

For Noodle. Noodle, Noodle, Noodle.

By the sixth platform, he’s slipped thrice more, burning an elbow to the bone and splashing his face with the full-body impact of throwing himself onto the stone rather than jumping, searing the skin from hairline to jaw across half his face. 2D would make a stuttering joke about Harvey Dent and ask if that made them brothers.

(It just about keeps him going, though the thought of old paper-brain makes him want to be sick and cry and laugh and punch something all at once. He settles on just breathing. Breathing is good.)

Everything is _killing_ him here, he’s in agony. His hands and knees have contact-burn from the lava-hot stone, his jeans melting into his skin, but he doesn’t _care_. The sleeve of the elbow he burnt had caught fire briefly, but when he throws himself onto dry land and the impact rolls him, twisting his not-burnt ankle as he tumbles, the fire is put out.

He lies there for a moment, getting his breath back, biting back the pain until he can taste the blood from his lips.

Alichino, halfway across the lava, stares at him in shock as he gets shakily to his feet and dusts himself down.

‘Bonturo Dati!’ Murdoc yells at him, sticks his fingers up and takes off running.

There is a dark, forgotten corner buried deep into the wall of one corridor. Having lost the conga line of imps some turns back, Murdoc backs himself into it and catches his breath once more. He is totally swallowed by the shadows here, and he’s sure he can’t be seen from the corridor. Heard, yes, but not seen.

He rakes his hands through his hair, puts his head between his knees. A jut of stone in the wall digs into his arse as he doubles over, but he doesn’t pay it any mind. Just one more pain atop the rest.

Later, he will tell himself that he was not sick, nor did he cry. He admits he is not strong enough for this, he cannot fight his way through the legions of Hell. He is one man, and he has made enough mistakes that he is _fucked_ down here.

Shivering, because he is not crying, he is just so pumped full of adrenaline and it is giving him the kind of buzz he normally only gets on stage or in dark alleys with the glint of steel two inches from his face, he stares at his mangled boots, and for once, for _once_ , he prays to something not Satan. He doesn’t know who or what it is he’s praying to.

By the time he straightens, he’s not panting like a bitch in heat so much, and he feels not-as-woozy enough to continue forward. Checking that the coast is clear, he hurries on, slipping through the gaps of an iron gate, and descends.

There are less imps here, a quieter, stiller air that clings closer to him. Is this what sulphur smells like, he wonders, and his heels click against the stone as he walks. Everything feels both hotter and colder all at once. Sterile and yet so filthy. The immediate lack of an assault on him bothers him more than anything; surely they know he’s coming? He has not exactly been _subtle_ about this whole thing.

Beelzebub should have raised an alarm Hell-wide by now, and everything not a sinner burning should be on high alert. He is Trouble.

Once, he might have delighted in that, but now he’s just uncomfortable.

The smell that begins to permeate the air is familiar, the burning, stinking skin of rotting corpses. It’s the landfill stench of Kong, the zombies in the cellar that are forever trying to break through the barricade. There are gorillas, he remembers, on the hill outside. Are they still there? Or are they down here now, rotting along with the rest of the monstrosities made in that lab?

(He remembers how excited 2D had been to learn of the biological experiments that had taken place. Excitement in theory does not carry into practice, though, and Murdoc remembers the first nights before they fixed the barricade being full of screaming and pissing-pants and Paula making too much noise directly into his ear for his liking, but God forbid he raise so much as an eyebrow in her direction. Hell below, he thinks.)

Walking for hours and hours and hours, suspecting very much so that he is just going round and round in circles, everything looking the same, he finds himself thinking more and more about the early days of _Gorillaz_ , of all the things they did and didn’t do – that he did and didn’t do. He remembers robbing every grave in the yard the night Noodle arrived, and he remembers Russel trying to fight him on it. He remembers cracking his fingers and stealing more purses and wallets than he had in his life. For Noodle, he thinks. Everything had been for her. The authorities had given him all but full custody of dentface, stupidly. But 2D was an adult and, however legendarily _thick_ he was, he’d made the conscious decision to stay with Murdoc, at Kong. Noodle was a child, and one that didn’t speak English. If the authorities got wind of her being mistreated in the least, if her clothes were dirty or her living quarters not up to snuff, they could take her from him. From the band.

He had not come that far to lose her. And he has not changed in all this time. She is still his guitarist, his friend, his –

He pauses at the end of a long path that has either appeared, or he has failed to notice. This, he thinks, rolling his shoulders, cracking his neck. This is it. He knows she’ll be heavily-guarded. She always has been. Beelzebub has never trusted her, nor the Big Man Below. She is something foreign to their operation, an uncontrollable force in their chess matches. She has to be _contained_.

She was _never_ contained. She’d found her way into his bedroom when he was ten and delighted in the taste of his pulse quickening beneath her fangs with not a mark on her to suggest there was resistance.

Murdoc has not seen Lilith for almost thirty years, twenty in this body. Thirty years is a long time to be away. He thinks idly of Chopper, who’d broken his nose the first time. He remembers the taste of his blood in his mouth. What does he do now, he wonders? Has his street-corner-sign position been replaced by a bucket of soil?

If there was any kind of justice in the world.

(Murdoc is beginning to suspect, privately, that there is no such thing, and that really, they are all out here on their own because nothing else in the universe cares. Not justice, not God, not fate. And certainly not Satan. None of them can give even the slightest of shits about humanity. It’s a little depressing, that.)

Her guards are hulking skeletons with fists like hammers and the density of diamond. Murdoc’s knuckles crack against their shin bones, and a kick from one sends him flying back the thirty or so feet down the corridor he’d just traversed, only to crash into the wall as he goes. The scraping rock takes a layer or five of skin from his back. It’s nothing new.

He’s surprised his face survived the kick, though he’s spitting blood and teeth.

Rolling clumsily to his feet, ears ringing, he dodges their swipes, searches the environment with harried glances to find something, anything, to take them down. If he was doing this for himself, his own personal escape attempt, he wouldn’t bother. But he has to come _back_ this way. He has to get Noodle out. So he has to make sure these bastards aren’t chasing him.

Fighting Lilith with them present would be a hassle to boot.

‘Look,’ he tries, because he’s always been able to make the universe see things his way, ‘can you just _not_ attack me? I’m kind of a little fucking _busy_ , you understand. Gotta rescue my girl, you see. Little thing she is, killer guitarist. Nice singing voice; could go very far. I’m invested in her progress.’

He stumbles back beyond the reach of a swinging arm, trips over a rock and lands spread-eagled on his back. The blow narrowly avoids his cock.

Scrambling to his feet, he cuts his losses, and tears down the path. Hopefully, the entrance to Lilith’s lair will be too small for the goliaths to fit.

It is, because the doors are shut when he arrives. The stench is worse here, thicker and clogging his throat with the taste of his own bile. The doors are bone and ivory and the blood of Satan himself. But it’s long since lost its power, sapped by her venom.

This will not be like it was with Alichino, or with the skeletons just. He cannot outrun or outtalk her, avoid her blows and get somewhere she cannot go. Lilith is not an imp, not a creature born of Satan’s will. She is something else. She is not of Heaven, or of Hell. She is of _Earth_. Something about that makes her more dangerous. Murdoc is not sure what it is, but he can begin to guess, begin to shape ideas of man and monster and the implications of the bloodlines meeting in the middle. He remembers Belphegor, he remembers going back to the wreckage after the fire. Was there a fire? He doesn’t remember the details. He was young then, though, so young and all he knew was he was born there. Had he been hoping to find his mother? He doesn’t remember.

Man and monster had met there, he thinks, because what other kind of place could spit him out and deem him fit for life?

Shaking himself out, he slips through a hole in the doors, a small space he suspects only he and the most foolhardy of the imps would dare crawl through. Mouse-like, he creeps across the floor, rounding the corner of the room until Lilith comes into view, her splintering, diamond skin the most terribly beautiful thing he’s seen in years. He remembers her that night, caught in the moonlight and grinning with mouths of fangs stretched wide across a thin, pale face.

Swallowing, he straightens, and Noodle sees him. Her mouth opens, he shakes his head.

Lilith will fight him. Lilith will likely kill him. He will have to come back again, if that happens. Again and again and again. He will be unable to stop. He knows the path now.

Noodle is staring at him, and he can see the blisters on her wrists from here. Swallowing, he approaches as quietly as he can, glancing at the ground to avoid knocking stones.

‘Murdoc!’ Noodle cries, unable to keep her mouth shut now that she is positive he’s here.

Lilith whirls, mouthy and diamond-beautiful as ever, but looking starved, hateful. There is beauty in tragedy, he knows. 2D is a perfect example of that.

His demons take physical form, he thinks, waggles his blistering fingers in a wave. Lilith snarls. His broken lip aches as his grin stretches wide, wide, wide. Blood dribbles down his chin, stinking of rust. He wipes it away, and smears it across his jaw, twisted warpaint. But they weren’t his demons. Not really.

_I owe them too much._

‘You!’ she screeches, and the bitch lunges.

Every muscle aches, burnt and still smoking, but he ducks the swipe of claws and manages to kick her in the back of the leg.

She skids a few meters, dust flying as she digs her claws in and wheels. Murdoc spares a glance at Noodle, who is staring at him, lip wobbling. Her skin, so clean, so bloodless, snares him for a second too long, and Lilith’s claws rake so deep he thinks he hears her nick bone. Shit.

Noodle’s scream is so loud, but his heartbeat is louder still, a permanent bass-line pulsing beneath his skin. The skitter of claws and clack of fangs fades to nothing; instinct kicks in, and he almost hacks up a lung trying to keep pace.

(He thinks it now, thinks _If I get out of here, I am never smoking another fag in my life_ , but he knows the minute he gets back to the surface, the first thing he’s buying is a bottle of good rum and one of those multipacks of twenties. He hopes by the time he gets out, they still do that brand he likes.)

‘You’ve become the monster we always knew you were,’ Lilith spits at him.

‘You love it,’ he spits back, shifts his weight to the balls of his feet. His ankles protest. He ignores them. ‘You’d know all about _monsters_.’

She waves a hand, the air shimmers, and Murdoc sees himself. His face is burnt and rotten on the left side, his red eye all but falling out, as burnt as the rest. Half of his hair is missing, either torn out or burnt away, leaving only his bleeding, grimy scalp. His missing teeth almost, almost, match 2D’s. Brothers, indeed. Nose, bleeding, broken, crooked the other way again. His clothes are singed, in tatters. Blood drips from the chunks Lilith’s swiped from him, his skin still clinging to her claws. His boot somehow survived the dip in the lava, but it welded leather and rubber and denim to his foot and calf, everything a mangled mess of skin and dust and hellish shit. His twisted ankle sits crooked under his weight. His elbow is just bone, flesh ending and beginning either side, a cauterised half-finished waxwork. The blistering, blackened skin of his hands and his broken and missing nails are bloody claws.

He meets his own gaze, judges himself.

Barges straight through the looking glass and smashes his heel into Lilith’s gaping whore mouth.

She staggers, surprised, but recovers before the imprint of his boot has even blossomed across her face. Touching her cheek, she gives him the same sort of heavy-lidded look she had all those years ago.

‘I would know about monsters,’ she agrees, a sneer spreading like poison across her pretty, _pretty_ face. ‘I’ve birthed enough of them.’

She eyes him, circling, a vulture examining the recent kill. He cracks his neck. He’s going to lose a straight-up fist-fight with her. Her claws are that same shit what’s-his-name has. Hugh Jackman. Unbreakable, absolutely indestructible. He’s already lost a chunk of his flesh to her. He doesn’t need to lose more. They’re far more effective than _fists_.

He wishes he had the knuckle-dusters he kept in the shoebox under his bed. They might help a bit.

Instead he has his cheap Cuban heels, and three shattered knuckles.

Good odds.

‘You plan to _fight_ me?’ the bitch laughs, and presses so close he can taste the rot in the back of his throat. ‘You? Tiny little Murdoc Niccals, with his big words and his bigger plans? You made a big deal back then, my sweet. You cannot live forever.’

Noodle is staring at him, he can feel the heat of her gaze on his temple, working its way beneath the blood and sweat and dirt.

‘Watch me,’ he says, and they are nose-to-nose.

He smashes his forehead into hers with a resounding crack, and staggers back, clutching his face in agony. He doesn’t think his nose is broken again, but _something_ sure fucking is.

His vision spins, and he stumbles sideways, tripping over his own feet. Lilith, totally unfazed, laughs at him as he collapses, sprawling across the dirt and still clutching his bleeding, broken face.

‘My baby boy,’ she coos, three – no, five – of her skittering closer to climb over him, press her weight to trap him.

His fingers scrape uselessly through the dirt, heels catching on nothing. She laughs at him, pins his wrists with her hands, pressing them into the dust above his head. His bones creak from the pressure. He’s starting to develop rheumatoid in his fingers and toes, and it wouldn’t surprise him if it had spread down to his elbows, his shoulders.

Noodle is screaming again.

It has been a long, _long_ time since he last felt personal terror. Terror for himself, genuine fear for his safety, his health, his life. But Lilith never forgave him for that time when he was ten, that lingering doubt over _was this what I wanted, is this the person I want to become_ that had permeated the shadows and stained them yellow with nicotine.

‘Close your eyes,’ he howls at Noodle, not knowing if she can hear him, not caring. ‘Don’t look, no matter what! Don’t look!’

Lilith’s breath smells of dead meat and moulding lust, a millennia old but never forgotten. It makes him gag, turn his head. His vision centres, all the swirling patterns meeting in the middle. Her claws dig into his wrist, sliding clean through. He wonders why he feels no pain when he looks; it’s his burnt arm. Disconnected nerves. Psychosomatic pain. Shock. Adrenaline. It doesn’t matter. He’s going to die down here.

This was Beelzebub’s plan, he thinks, her claws dragging up along his arm, peeling the skin and muscle from the bone. This was what the bastard wanted to happen. He wanted Murdoc’s soul, and he had it. He was never going to get out of here.

He has never seen his bones before, and he never intends to see them again, because he has no intention of putting himself into a position to watch the skin and muscle be peeled away from his bones like a glove. The bones look brittle, broken in a dozen places. He’s surprised his fingers don’t fall off the moment the skin-and-blood wrapping is gone.

‘Wow,’ he says with a sniff, swallowing bile and the stench of her.

His bones glitter and click and clack as he waggles them. By all rights they shouldn’t move, not with all the nerves and muscles and other gooey bits pulled off, but they waggle anyway.

Lilith stares at him, and he stares back. Nose-to-nose again, she could kiss him and he wouldn’t have been any more surprised than if she’d slapped him. He breaks the stare, disgusted with the thought.

‘Well now,’ she coos, and licks the burnt side of his face with an obscenely long tongue. The acid in it stings, burning through the scabs and singeing the bone. He has never had very nice cheekbones, too low and rounded and thuggish, but they’re _his_ cheekbones, and he’d like them left intact.

He has done many things in his life, but he has never, not once, sold his body for money. The thought of doing so makes him sick, tears at the crutches holding his heart aloft in his chest, and he has to take a moment any time it comes up. Sometimes, 2D makes a joke about that time he talked, drunkenly, about Alan Sugar, and he has to step outside to sit with the crows and smoke his way through whatever’s left in the packet.

Maybe it’s because of what they say happened to him at Belphegor, or because of how he was conceived. He’s not sure. But he never lets himself fall low enough.

Lilith seems to not care a whit about that, despite knowing what happened all those years ago. She’d proven already that she didn’t care about anything but her own excess, and he hopes, as he squirms and tries to get a leg up to kick her in the ribcage, that Noodle’s eyes are shut.

As he struggles and curls and writhes, trying to find the right leverage beneath her weight to free his legs, Lilith calls him adorable, sweet. She giggles and dots kisses all over the tattered remnants of his face, taking particular delight in the tear in his lip. The acid on her tongue, on her lips, sears through the flesh, rotting it away and he tries not to scream. It’s the acute pains that hurt the worst, and this is the worst of the lot so far.

He thinks he hears someone call his name, and he knows he cannot die here.

Another twist, a buck, and he’s got his legs up, high enough to press against her ribcage and throw her off him. She pulls an arm, and he’s not sure it doesn’t pull out of its socket as she goes.

Before she has a chance to right herself, flailing like a turtle on its back, he’s there, knees on her shoulders, hand behind her head, hand on her fanged, dripping mouth. It burns at his palm, tearing the skin. For a second, as she thrashes beneath him, they lock gazes.

Black eyes stare up at him, betrayed and proud and lusty in equal measure, flitting red as rage ignites.

He sits straight, locks his shoulders, and twists. Something snaps, a crackle and a pop as her neck twists and breaks. It won’t keep her down. It’s probably barely hurt her. But she goes limp under him, and he chokes on vomit as he staggers back to his feet.

‘Murdoc?’

It’s quiet, tentative, a whisper in the panting silence.

He turns to Noodle, still hanging there, wrists burnt to blistered black, her eyes firmly shut.

‘Noodle,’ he breathes, and spits blood and bile to where Lilith’s incapacitated form lies before hurrying to her. He doesn’t have long, he knows.

He splinters his finger bones prying Noodle’s cuffs off, foot braced on the wall and watching Lilith’s unmoving body for signs of life. Something like regret sweeps through his gut, that same regret that swept through him the day he learnt his father was dead. But he swallows it, bends his knee, and pulls. He scratches Noodle’s arm a little, and staggers back from the force of the cuff giving way. Noodle immediately begins clawing uselessly at the other cuff.

A grinding crackle from where Lilith lies, and Murdoc swears, hurrying the four steps across Noodle’s arm span to the other cuff. His fingers splinter further, and he rips another two nails off his intact hand. Stinking and wet, he manages to wipe the blood away to get his bones into the seam and yank. Now that he knows where the weak point is, this one is easy to get off, and as soon as it’s free, Noodle is on the move, grabbing his hand and running back the way he came.

Lilith groans, and her shoulder lifts, arm folding.

‘Fuck,’ Murdoc whispers, and he and Noodle match their strides as they hurry towards the hole he’d crawled through.

‘Go,’ he hisses, shoving her into the hole, not even thinking about the bloody handprint he leaves on her arse as he pushes.

Lilith has her head up off the floor by the time he’s scrambling through the hole.

Noodle is staring at the skeletons, and Murdoc grabs her hand.

‘Shift your arse,’ he spits, and she does so.

She runs a little faster than he does, but that’s hardly surprising. They manage to keep enough pace to outrun the skeletons and get back to that alcove Murdoc had hidden in. There’s enough room for the both of them, just.

They catch their breath, embrace hard, fingers knotting in skin and cotton and breathing deep. Murdoc smells and looks like absolute shite, but Noodle breathes him in anyway, laughing against his collarbone. It sounds like sobbing.

When she’s had her fill of him, because he knows her well enough, she’s practical about these things, if a little emotional, she pulls away, and tells him to lead on.

Noodle keeps trying to pull free of his hand, but he keeps digging the shattered ends of his finger bones into the back of her hand to keep her quiet.

‘Murdoc,’ she keeps whispering, in varying degrees of fear and worry and childish wonderment, and he ignores her every time. He cannot waste a second talking to her right now.

Lilith will be conscious again now, on the move, and he has to find another way back to the portal. The lake is a no-go from this side, with a teenage girl in tow.

(He blames it on her, but she’s been doing twenty-feet-high karate kicks from age ten, it’s him that’ll be unable to make the jumps.)

‘Murdoc!’ she cries again, and digs her heels in.

He almost pulls her over entirely, drags her forward with a jerk that has her stumbling into him. He wobbles, but miraculously keeps his balance.

‘What?’ he hisses, rounding on her.

‘I need to rest,’ she breathes, and he looks at her.

She looks exhausted, too hot and too tight and too everything not the Noodle he remembers, so full of energy and life and pure _joy_. God, he feels old.

‘We don’t have time,’ he says, glances at the skeletons patrolling along an adjoining corridor. Have they gone in a circle? No, no this is a different expanse of stone, he’s sure.

‘I’m too hot,’ she tells him, ‘I can barely breathe.’

He looks at her again; a black eye is beginning to form. It’s splintering across her cheek, broken blood vessels blooming black and purple like a shrinking violet. Only it doesn’t shrink, it grows and grows and grows as he watches. It’s just bruising, he tells himself, watching as her eye swells, squint forming between puffy lids. It’s just bruising. She isn’t rotting.

‘Lilith,’ he murmurs, and goes to reach for her, realises that everything is on the wrong side, and crouches, braces himself with his bone hand, brushes the dirty, burning fingertips of his other hand across the bruises.

Noodle flinches, and he cups her cheek.

‘You’ll forget this,’ he promises her, draws her close to kiss that swollen eye. He leaves a smear of blood. ‘When we get out, you won’t remember. You’ll be okay.’

‘Will you remember?’ she asks.

‘Probably.’

She quivers, but her feet remain flat, her back straight. She nods, and he runs his hand through her hair before straightening.

‘Let’s go home,’ he tells her, and offers his still-skinned hand.

She takes it. Squeezes. Whispers his name like a prayer.

It isn’t long before she is almost taken from him again. He has never met Sidragosum personally, only dealt with him through the various letters and phone calls and that one time the radio in his car was possessed.

(In retrospect, this is probably what made him lose control of the car in the Nottingham car park, because he hadn’t intended to catapult 2D through the windscreen, despite what he might say.)

The demon is a lanky, human-ish fellow. Not humanoid. Human-ish. Like a waxwork, or a mannequin. He looks like a man, but there is something _off_ about him.

Murdoc dislikes him intensely. Noodle lets herself be shoved behind him, though she’s digging her worn nails into his knuckles, a warning. _Don’t fight him_.

‘Hello, Murdoc,’ Sidragosum says, smiling. Genial, as though there isn’t anything wrong with a half-dead, rotting, corpse-like man and his not-daughter-sister-friend standing before him.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ Murdoc says, recognising the voice. He says it throw-away. Uninterested. Inconsequential.

Sidragosum looks offended. His eyes widen, then narrow. Murdoc’s ankles protest, but he braces his feet, and stupidly lets go of Noodle’s hand. He wipes blood from his nose – when had his nose started bleeding again? He forgets these things so easily – huffs, and raises his fists.

Sidragosum laughs.

‘You intend to fight me?’

Everyone says that, it’s getting to be a bore.

Murdoc tells him that.

‘I fought Lilith,’ he adds, slides one foot forward. It’s a poor duplication of what he’s seen Noodle do when she’s been asked to show off her karate moves during interviews or that one time during the _Dirty Harry_ shoot where the cameras fucking _broke_ and they had a squalling mass of children to entertain.

Noodle snorts behind him, and he rolls his shoulders, elects to ignore her.

‘Really? No wonder you look like dog shit,’ Sidragosum tells him, and Murdoc tosses his head in a shrug.

What remains of his hair is dripping sweat into his eyes, plastered to his forehead and stinging the acid-and-lava-burnt holes peppered into his temple.

‘I don’t understand how you got so many girls to go to your bed,’ the demon continues, and steps close.

He’s a little taller than Murdoc, the way most men are a little taller than Murdoc, but he doesn’t let the demon use it to his advantage. He’s not a squeamish man, not easily intimidated. A demon getting in his business when he can still taste Lilith is not really anything at all.

‘Oh! I _remember_ ,’ he coos, and his eyes bore into Murdoc’s.

Murdoc smiles, slow. Behind him, he can hear Noodle shift, uncomfortable. She has seen Murdoc in many stand-offs, many fights. But this is _different_. The atmosphere is different here, darker, heavier. It isn’t just some thug trying to take money from them, or accusing them of something, or saying rude things about the band, insulting what Murdoc sold his soul to build up. This is _more_ than that.

‘I know you do,’ Murdoc hums, smug. His heart is knocking his ribs out of place, jumping too hard in his neck. Sidragosum watches it for a moment, amused, before sliding his gaze back, over Murdoc’s shoulder. ‘My eyes are here, mate.’

But the demon isn’t listening, and the crack of Murdoc’s knuckles in his cheek barely registers on the demon’s face. A redness blooms in the shape of Murdoc’s hand, but he is unmoving, stands there watching Noodle.

The girl shifts, and Murdoc grabs the demon’s face, yanks it back to him.

‘Eyes _here_ , Sid,’ he spits, and the demon laughs.

He _feels_ , more than he sees or hears, Noodle move, stride short, skipping. Her feet twist, body following.

‘Don’t,’ he hisses, but doesn’t dare tear his eyes from Sidragosum’s to look at her. ‘Leave her be, she’s innocent.’

‘If she was innocent, she wouldn’t be here, would she?’

The remnants of Murdoc’s lip curls. He digs hard enough with his nails that blood spots in Sidragosum’s cheeks. The demon remains unfazed.

‘I suppose she _is_ innocent, at least in terms of her crimes. She is a product of her upbringing, after all, and we can’t expect miracles when you are the one she calls for most. Though. Is that because she knows you can come here without limitation? Because you are the only one dirty enough to find her? You _do_ know she’s here because of you, don’t you? Because you refuse to answer our calls?’

Murdoc knows this, had known it the moment demons swarmed Kong. But he came anyway, because Noodle asked him to, begged him. He has never been able to say no.

Noodle continues to dance, twirling and moving to a song Murdoc cannot hear. He can see her in the corner of his eye, a beautiful, immaculate ballerina dancing for the dead, and he feels something lodge in his throat. His heart, maybe.

There isn’t anywhere for her to _go_ , not in this corridor. There are no lava pits, and no dark hollows for her be snatched into. But he worries anyway. The deal he cut with the demon was shady at best, and regret has boiled like sour milk in his gut for too long.

‘Leave her be,’ he whispers, and the demon grins.

‘I’m under orders, old boy,’ the demon replies, and reaches up to pat Murdoc’s cheek. The exposed nerves almost bring him to his knees. Blood trickles down the demon’s jaw as he digs his fingers in. ‘Much higher power than your begging.’

‘I am not begging,’ Murdoc whispers, a hiss now. ‘I am _ordering_.’

‘You have no power here,’ Sidragosum replies with a laugh, and breaks out of Murdoc’s grip, not caring about the scoured lines in his cheeks from Murdoc’s nails.

Helpless, because what can he _do_ , Murdoc watches the demon slip effortlessly into Noodle’s waltz, a perfect partner for her perfect dance.

 +

(‘Mud-doc?’ Noodle whispers, and he rolls, almost tumbles out of bed as he turns to look at the door. She cannot say his name yet, he remembers, something about the vowels.

He lies there for a moment, blinking hard to adjust to the light streaming in through the cracked door. Noodle is stood there in her pyjamas – one of 2D’s T-shirts, and a pair of shorts he doesn’t know the origin of – clutching her blanket. He rubs a hand over his face, hauls himself upright.

‘You a’ight, love?’ he slurs, and makes to get out of bed.

For a moment she stops and thinks. ‘Bad sleep,’ she whispers back, and slips into the room, shutting the door behind her and blocking out the light.

He squints, and she waves her hand, tries to find another word.

‘Bad dreams?’ he asks, when his brain has caught up to her mouth.

Nodding, she rubs her hair. He scratches at his jaw – he needs a shave again, and makes a note to get razors, and hide them out of 2D’s reach this time – and eventually throws the covers back, shifting to the side of the bed to give her space.

She mumbles something that he knows is a thank you, and hurries over, jumping onto the creaking old bed, careful to not let her legs get within arm’s reach of the dark space beneath. She wedges herself into the space between him and the wall, and tugs his arms around her.

He lies awake that night as she sleeps, snoring soft against his collar. Russel goes spare in the morning, and Murdoc has no intentions of explaining that the girl had a nightmare. He’s an arse, finds it hilarious. Noodle comes back again the next night, and the next, and naps pressed tight against his side when they break from recording.)

+ 

Shaking himself free of the memory, irrelevant and unnecessary and distracting, he does what he does best, and cuts in.

Noodle claws at him, too caught in this dream the demon’s created, but he swats her flailing hands away and hoists her up over his shoulder. She’s heavier than he estimated, all muscle. She claws at his back, but he digs his fingers into her thigh and backs away from the now-scowling Sidragosum.

‘What did you expect me to do?’ Murdoc asks him with a grin. ‘I can’t dance for shit. But I’m _great_ at cutting in.’

Sidragosum looks at them. Amusement curls across his lips. Noodle calls Murdoc a few choice names he hasn’t heard for years.

‘Hush,’ he tells her.

She slaps him hard in the back, where Lilith’s claws took a few inches out of him. He staggers, but keeps his feet.

‘Well,’ Murdoc says, ignoring her wailing, ‘I guess this is it. I’ll be heading off now, back home. Got shit to do, you understand. I’ll have to go stage a prison break for 2D, God knows he’ll be there forever if I leave him alone. You don’t mind _too_ terribly, do you?’

Sidragosum is laughing now. Murdoc expects to be dead in a second. But that second never comes, and the demon waves him away, apparently entertained enough to let him go without any further contest.

Murdoc does not hang around to let him change his mind.

Noodle is limp now, a dead weight on his shoulder, his pace slowed significantly even without the agony tearing through every pore and fracture and fissure of his body, but he manages to barrel through a set of heavy, blackened doors all the same.

A library? Fuck it. He doesn’t have time to look. Noodle groans somewhere behind his ear, and he ignores her, focused instead on putting one foot in front of the next and the next and the next, keeping moving against every nerve telling him to stop, just for a second.

Xitragupten does what Xitragupten has been doing for the last twenty years; he gets in the way and squawks indignantly about putting everything in Murdoc’s file.

‘Oh, _fuck off_ ,’ he snaps, and somehow finds it in him to punch the stupid secretarial bastard in the vaguely face-like _thing_ he talks out of. It’s a mass of eyeballs and a gaping maw, and it doesn’t do much but startle him.

Murdoc feels better for it anyway.

Slamming sideways into the door on the other side of the room, Murdoc finds himself back at the queue. He’s almost _there_. He can almost taste it.

Readjusting Noodle to carry her fireman-style, he takes a breath and sets his sights.

There are imps beginning to swarm the path, but he shoves his way through the queue and begins heading back towards the end. A few people see him moving back, holding a girl over his shoulder, and try to follow suit. The imps, who have orders to take Murdoc down, are not smart enough to prioritise, and begin bullying everyone who attempts to break free of the queue back into line. This is all Murdoc needs to get back to where the priests were bickering. A few thousand more people have arrived in the time he’s been running around, but he barges past them too. They scatter, terrified.

Lilith comes skittering out, climbing out from under _somewhere_ beneath them, and Murdoc curses, begs his body to work harder. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a splash of red letters. A green buggy. A new soul, one dead after him.

‘Fuck shit up!’ he howls at the boy.

He’s got a shaved head and broad shoulders and he’s wearing a _Gorillaz_ t-shirt, and he looks at Murdoc, burnt in a dozen places, with a girl in black boots and shorts and a striped shirt slung over his shoulders, and he recognises them.

God bless the boy, he immediately punches the guy nearest him, who thinks it was the guy next to him.

Bedlam spreads down the queue within seconds, and Murdoc bellows his thanks as he legs it past the last thousand people. Lilith tries to follow, but her way is blocked by brawling priests and Nazis and maybe even that bastard unfortunately responsible for siring Murdoc too. Maybe even him. Murdoc doesn’t give it enough thought to even register it as a possibility.

She screams his name, howls it like a dog, and his ears ring.

He can see the portal. Noodle groans again, clutches at his chest as she tries to right herself. He squeezes her wrist, digs shattered bones into her thigh. She gasps, and goes still again, accepts it.

Just a few more steps, a few more.

Murdoc slams into it with everything he has, and there is darkness.

 

**\+ + + +**

 

When Murdoc opens his eyes, he immediately gets a whole load of dirt in them, and he could _really_ do without that right now, thanks all the same. There is something terribly droll about waking up from a sojourn into Hell covered in a pile of dirt, but then, he supposes, he did technically _die_. That’s what happens when you go into Hell. The neon-lighted door doesn’t in fact lead to a strip joint, it leads to a cliff face where you plummet onto the rocks and lay there a tattered corpse until some poor bastard walking their dog finds you.

At least they had the sense to bury him in a coffin, so he’s at least got some oxygen. That’s nice.

Something scuffles to his right. Great, the badgers or moles or whatever have found their way in already. It was a cheap coffin then, no custom grim-reaper-Addams-Family-purple-velvet job for him. Fucking incredible.

He does his best to punch it and make it fuck off.

It coughs at him, sounding very girlish and familiar.

‘Noodle?’ he asks, voice scratchy, dry, unused and rotting, and Noodle pinches him wherever she can reach; somewhere between two ribs.

‘I think my nose is broke!’ she hisses at him, but she cuddles up all the same, wriggling the inches it takes to get pressed around his ribs. She feels bigger than he remembers.

How long were they “dead?”

‘Join the club,’ he tells her. He’s lost count of his fractures and breaks.

‘I missed you,’ she whispers into his collar. Her breath is too warm for the small space and sweat prickles instantly.

‘I missed you too, pet,’ he says, turns his head, kisses her hair. ‘We need to get out of here.’

She nods, and he feels her swallow, hears it. ‘What do we do?’

‘You cover your face,’ he tells her, and his fingers crack as he clenches his fist.

The first slam of his knuckles hits right into a seam between two slats of the lid, and does about as much damage as it does when he punches concrete. Pain zips along his nerves like a spark, and he snarls. The second sends another spark. His knuckle is broken, he’s almost sure. The skin is split, definitely, he can feel the trickle of blood oozing dirt-thick down tendons and the knob of bone in his wrist. The smell of iron fills the limited air.

Limited. Shit.

He takes a moment.

‘Keep breathing,’ he whispers to Noodle, who nods into his armpit. How she can breathe that in is beyond him.

He takes a breath. Holds it.

Three minutes later, he is still holding it. He hadn’t even spared it a thought, too busy pounding on the coffin like it’s 2D’s face.

No, no, not 2D’s face. Not at all 2D’s face. Jimmy fucking Manson’s face. _Yes_ , there it is. Little Jimmy Manson who wanted to suck his dick and stab him in the same breath. Little Jimmy Manson who is swimming with the fishes and Murdoc wishes he met him in Hell. He wishes harder than he has ever wished. It’s one more regret to add to the list. He punches harder.

More blood. More iron. More dirt showering down onto them.

Time crawls, marked by the crack of his knuckles against the shattering wood. Noodle is wheezing, clutching at his shirt sporadically. He punches in time with the grasping fingers.

Her grasps slows. His knuckles burn, arm sticky.

One last punch and the whole bloody lot gives way, swamping them. Choking. Murdoc still isn’t breathing.

He grabs Noodle’s collar, holds her tight, begins digging. Getting two people out of six feet of compacted dirt is not much better than getting two people out of any other six feet of anything.

He’s going to have conjunctivitis for _months_.

For a few terribly scary moments, he thinks Noodle is _dead_ , but then his hand grasps absolutely bugger all, and he manages to shove his arm high enough above ground to get a grip on grass or some other shit and haul. A few tugs is all it takes to break the surface, and he yanks Noodle out.

The earth is nice; it spits them out much like its sister, the sea, spits out the drowned. Noodle coughs and splutters and vomits onto the grass.

Murdoc exhales, a soft sigh. He flops onto his back, stares at the stars.

‘At least they didn’t bury me upside down,’ he snorts.

Noodle crawls over to him, collapses half-on, half-off. He’s sweaty and bloody and stinks to high hell of dirt and badger shit and his own mortality. She doesn’t care.

They lie there for a few minutes in heaving, gasping silence, Murdoc’s mutilated fingers weaving cat’s cradles through Noodle’s tangled hair.

‘Are we alive?’ she asks him.

‘I think so,’ he replies, stares at the stark glow of his finger bones in the blinding glow of the uninterrupted moon. He’s seen those bones before, he’s sure.

As they lie there, and Noodle begins to drift, body warm and familiar against his, he feels his body begin working again, all the pumps and tickers loosening and getting back into the rhythm of it. His mind is quick to catch up, every moment of Hell flooding his senses. He bites back the sob, the urge to roll and puke, because he doesn’t want to disturb Noodle.

(Murdoc does not sleep that night, nor the next, nor the one after that. He watches his girl in what he acknowledges to himself is outright terror. He knows that if he closes his eyes for even a moment, she’ll be gone again, killed by his own inability. He’ll never get her back if he lets her go. The only clouds he’ll see will be smoke.)

In the morning, they pick themselves up off the dirt and take stock.

Noodle is a little scuffed and absolutely _filthy_ , but she’s intact and alright. Shaken-up, but alright. Her face is bruised, that same eye Lilith got to, but it’s just a bruise here, nothing rotting or broken. She must have bumped it on the way out. It’ll heal. She’s wearing the same clothes she wore when she died, the same as him, but she’s grown, older now, and they’re far too small for her. Everything looks tight and uncomfortable, and he manages to pull the neckline of that striped top loose enough (tears it, really, there’s no two ways about it) to let her breathe, but there’s not a lot he can do about the rest. But other than being dirty and a bit banged-up, she looks alright. All of her limbs are where they should be and there are no gaping holes.

He searches her face for anything that might suggest – suggest – for anything _wrong_.

She stares back, wide-eyed, breathing deep. He cups her face, tears well, and she collapses. He holds her tight, nose and mouth in her hair. His toes press wide in the space of his boots; he’s rocking her like a baby. Like they all did back in the beginning, when the screeching of the crows outside terrified her, when she dreamt of things she couldn’t quite remember. She used to bolt to a dark corner, but that terrified her more.

(Murdoc, when he slept in the building, left his light on at all times. She came straight to him the moment she realised a light on meant he was in. He was not necessarily awake, but he was there.

Russel and 2D soon cottoned on, and she went to whoever’s light was on. After a while, she gravitated toward Russel. Murdoc didn’t mind. Much.)

‘Your fingers,’ she sobs, and he tells her to shut her mouth.

She shuts her mouth and continues to weep into his shirt.

Eventually, her tears run out, and she straightens, rubbing her face with the crook of her elbow. It smears dirt, but she avoids her eyes.

‘You look green,’ she tells him, and he blinks stupidly.

‘I feel fine,’ he replies.

‘No,’ she says, and her smile is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. ‘No, you’re _literally_ green. Look.’

She puts her hand against his, and his skin is lime-green compared to the sunshine of hers.

‘Oh,’ he says, and thinks hard about why this is.

‘There,’ she says, after a moment has passed. ‘It’s gone. Back to being you again.’

Murdoc looks down at their hands; his skin is that same pallid, greyish tone it has always been, something a little sickly, but human.

‘I suppose I’ll have to pay attention, won’t I? Can’t be scaring the kiddie-winkles,’ he hums, and tries for a chuckle.

But the expression on Noodle’s face stops him after only a couple of barked laughs, because her expression is mirroring what he’s thinking; he’s not Right.

When they find it in themselves to move, his arm is numb from fingertip to shoulder, and he lets it hang limp at his side as they walk. Noodle clutches his other hand like it’s holding her down. Or holding him up.

 He tries not to grip tight enough to break her skin.

 They manage to work out where they are after stumbling across a main road, and from there, they manage to find fresh water at a running stream.

Murdoc drinks until he’s sick, scrubs his hands and face, and leaves Noodle with strict instructions to stay where she is. He doesn’t want to leave her, but there was a row of houses a minute or so back, and she’ll be a liability there.

He returns several minutes later with clean clothes for her, a bar of soap, and a towel. She looks at him. He gives her a crooked smile, an attempt. She accepts the gift, stolen as it is, and tells him to turn his dirty old man back whilst she washes. Sticking his fingers up and echoing her stuck-out-tongue, he does as asked and looks determinedly at a bush a few feet away. He read the Bible once, and a bush got set on fire. His fingers itch for his lighter; it’s gone. Has 2D got it? Did they – whoever they were, police, hospital, Beelzebub – did they let 2D keep his shit? The lighter was probably the most expensive thing he kept in his pockets. He’d like 2D to keep it, he thinks, and then shakes the thought away.

He listens to her splash about in the stream, and she asks him how he managed to steal a bar of soap.

‘Got two of your lifetime’s experience, pet,’ he tells her, runs his hands through his hair. His hand is looking worse by the hour.

Keeping his back to her, he hops to the other side of the stream and plonks his arse down, dunks his hand in the water.

‘Does it hurt?’ she asks.

‘Agony,’ he replies, and rubs his neck.

It’s here that he realises his cross is missing, the familiar weight of the old, filthy chain with its pliers-squeezed broken links and bloodstains gone from his neck. He pats his front down, as though expecting the chain to have broken again and got caught up inside his T-shirt, but there is no body-warm copper or chain. Huh. He rubs a tight spot in his neck, and considers whether the loss of it is particularly bothersome. Noodle hums a tune behind him, and splashes about some more; she’s dancing, he can tell, putting her mind to something else. Does she remember the details of what happened in Hell? Does she just remember the fear and the sadness and the pain? Or does she remember everything? He hopes to anything listening that she remembers _nothing_.

He doesn’t consider her dancing might not be _her_. He can’t bring himself to think it. His contract with Sidragosum must be voided by now, ineffectual. The demon can’t possibly have any way to control him or those around him, particularly ones of a female persuasion.

He glances at his knuckles; the water has gurgled about his fingers enough to wear the clots and scabs and dirt away, drawing fresh blood. Ah, well.

The necklace, Murdoc decides, he does not miss all that much. After that shit-show, he thinks privately that he doesn’t much care anymore. Hell had not lived up to his standards, had not treated him the way that he, a loyal follower of the Big Man Down Below, had expected. It was almost like they didn’t _appreciate_ him, and if Murdoc’s life had taught him nothing else, it had been to recognise where he wasn’t wanted, and to _leave_.

So he left. He left and he took Noodle with him, and he’ll never go back.

(He will not admit for years, but he is terrified to sleep for fear of going back. Something is following them, has followed them since he got them out of Hell, and it won’t stop following them until he’s back in the queue, waiting for his Judgement.)

When she’s dressed, she rounds him and kneels, takes his hand into her lap to look at it. The knuckles are exposed, and he’s sure two of his proximal phalanges are broken. She presses the remains of that torn, striped shirt of hers to his hand. It hurts, but he says nothing.

The clothes he stole for her are a little small, but not as small as the ones she’d died in. The dress sits higher on her thigh than he would like it to, but it’s too late now, and she’s wearing underwear at least. If he passes some shorts or something, he’ll nab those, too. But for now, mini-dress and pumps it is.

If it was anyone not Noodle, he might joke about the high-necked white dress with its red trim being a little nurse-like. But it’s Noodle, and she has genuine concern on her bruised face, and he keeps his mouth shut.

At a picnic spot they pass as they walk in the general direction of “home,” she disappears. Murdoc pretends he doesn’t go absolutely spare. But he panics. Just a little. She returns at a trot, clutching something in her hand and grinning wide.

‘Where have you been?’ he hisses, knuckles cracking. But his hands stay at his sides, and he settles for a glare.

She holds up her stolen goods. Ice cream sticks. Brain cogs whir into motion, and the glare begins to soften into something resembling – well, Murdoc’s not one for openly displaying his pride, but it’s creeping in, around the corners of his mouth.

‘I saw them,’ she says, proud of herself. ‘And I thought you could use them. For your hand.’

She knows him too well; he won’t set foot in a hospital until he’s dead.

Been there, done that.

He nods; they need rinsing off, still with ice cream and lipstick on, so they wander back towards the stream, and Murdoc does his best with what he’s got.

‘Did you know I have a medical degree?’ he hums as he works, biting down on his sleeve to tear it off. He rinses the fabric out, and the water streaks red and brown for over a minute.

‘A medical degree?’

‘I’m a licensed doctor,’ he tells her, tears a strip from the sleeve, shoves the rest in his pocket. ‘Earned it in Mexican prison.’ For a moment, he considers this, and then he adds, ‘I can legally write 2D’s prescriptions now.’

She thinks he’s pulling her leg. He splints his fingers, wrapping the scrap of sleeve around his fingers, around his hand, and halfway up his arm, and they carry on their way.

(He tears the other sleeve off after about half an hour, because having one long sleeve is just plain _stupid_. She looks at the cross and octopus on his arm, and smiles. The memories of Hell begin to ebb under the weight of that smile.)

  **T B C**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title is from Feel Good, Inc. [turn forever, hand in hand, take it all in on your stride]   
> \- The monster from the game Murdoc thinks of is the Air Screamer from the original Silent Hill, which came out in ’98, I believe.  
> \- The demons Murdoc faces are the ones he mentions in his live facebook chat, found on the Gorillaz wiki page for him. They are as follows; Alichino, a demon from The Divine Comedy, who done fucked up with the sinner Bonturo Dati, who fools him into persuading the other devils to leave him be to try and escape. Lilith is obvious. Sidragosum, as listed in my Dicitonary of Demons, is a demon with the power to make young girls irresistibly dance (okay, Murdoc, okay.) Xitragupten is my fave of these assholes; from what I gather, he’s a secretary who writes down every good and bad deed a person does, taken from The Mysteries of All Nations by James Grant (page 211, its on google books). I like to imagine he’s the reason for the green biro note, because Murdoc is never not doing something. What a dick.  
> \- I hear Murdoc’s heartbeat bass-line as either The Swagga or 19-2000.   
> \- Rheumatoid is a type of arthritis, and according to Rise of the Ogre on page 178, he’s an arthritic booze-monkey who must be very proud of his repulsiveness. I’m sure he is.  
> \- God, Murdoc, Dean managed to dig out of his grave in like 30 seconds by pulling on the lid, what’s wrong with you? Jeez, Murdoc.  
> \- I've probably cocked up somewhere, I can feel it. Let me know if I have.  
> -Thanks for reading, lovelies!


	2. The Future is Coming On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They find 2D in Beirut a few days later.

_“If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.”_

**Martin Luther King, Jr.**

 

They find 2D in Beirut a few days later. Noodle clings to his hand like it’ll hold it together, though it’s long since healed and has no evidence of ever being injured at all. Murdoc does not say exactly how he heals up the way he does without medical help. Noodle doesn’t trust him in the least, not that he blames her, and he’s just as happy to cling to her hand as she is to his.

After all he did to get her back, to save her, he feels he has the right to keep her close.

He is so busy staring at 2D that he doesn’t feel the insistent tugging on his hand.

‘What?’ he snaps, but Noodle gives him a Look, and he gives her a facial shrug, an apologetic curled-lip and lifted-brow.

‘You’re going green again,’ she whispers to him.

People are staring. He swallows, his shoulders tense. He shudders. His skin, his muscles, his blood, his everything, it all slots back into place, falls back into line, and he feels a little more natural.

He glances at her; she nods, approving. He goes back to staring at 2D.

When Noodle asks, he does not tell her how he found him, how he _knew_. Beirut seems so out-of-the-way, so unnatural, so random. The boy’s almost unrecognisable. He’s dyed his hair brown, gotten a tan; he talks to a merchant at a stall a few down from where they’re stood, and he has his front teeth again. At the first opportunity that presents itself, Murdoc is knocking the fucking things out again and buying as much _Head and Shoulders_ as he can get his hands on to strip that _awful_ colour from his hair.

Brown hair, for fuck sake! Brown!

The boy – man, he must be thirty now, right? Thirty-something? God, how long has it _been_? – is standing taller now, at his full height, rather than the stooped, cowering wreck of knotted fingers and stuttering, tripping accent. He’s wearing decent clothes. He looks healthy.

Murdoc wants to punch his fucking lights out and make him the boy he remembers. But at the same time, he – he doesn’t. He takes a breath, squeezes Noodle’s hand. She glances up at him, tugs, pulls him close.

‘It’s him?’ she asks, and he barely has to stoop to get his ear in range of her mouth any more.

He nods, and rests his forehead on her shoulder. Tiredness is sweeping through him at the thought that 2D is better off without the band. How can the bastard be _happy_ without them? Without their fucked up little family? It makes him ache in places he’d forgotten he had.

His soul has long since been sold, but sometimes he forgets.

‘It’s him,’ he murmurs back, and straightens, clears any doubt, any hesitance from his face.

Noodle eyes him.

He stomps to the nearest vendor of fruit and hefts an apple in his palm. Noodle watches him, confused. She follows his squint to where 2D is laughing, rubbing the back of his gross, wrong, _not-his_ hair, and digs her nails into the tension-tight tendons of his wrist.

‘Don’t you _dare_!’ she spits at him. ‘Don’t you do it! He’s had enough brain injuries, Murdoc!’

He shoots a look at her, bottom jaw jutted forward into a grumpy, cat-like pout. The round jaw, the baby face he can’t shed no matter how shitty he looks, really it just makes him look a bit monkey-ish.

Grunting at her wide-eyed, pleading face, he dumps the apple back onto the stand, despite the vendor’s squawks about bruising, and picks up a peach instead. He displays it wordlessly to Noodle, who glares, but acquiesces.

‘I don’t see why you can’t just say Hello,’ she huffs.

‘Because I’ll punch him in the face, and I don’t want to do that,’ Murdoc grunts.

The poor girl is so taken aback by this admittance that she fails to react before her – her – what is Murdoc to her anyway? – well, whatever he is, she’s still reeling when he rears back and sends the peach flying.

It somehow, by a twist of fate, for once in Murdoc’s favour, manages to avoid everybody except its intended recipient, where it hits with enough force to send the stupid bastard staggering back several steps.

He looks better, yes. But he _isn’t_ better. He’s still a weed with no thorns to protect himself.

Scraping smashed peach from his face and rubbing the bruise where the stone hit his cheek with all the force of a bouncy ball, he looks around, throwing his gaze left and right.

Noodle is shorter than Murdoc still, just. She makes him pick her up so she can see.

Just as Murdoc straightens from the half-crouch so Noodle could climb onto his back, 2D looks straight at them.

For a moment, it’s like climbing out of the dirt again. They all freeze. Time slows.

Murdoc isn’t sure who moves first. They crash together in the middle, 2D swamping them both in his arms, Noodle’s forehead hitting his nose as Murdoc’s face is smushed into his collar at the force of the collision. 2D smells of that same god-awful body spray he always used, and Murdoc holds his breath.

‘I missed you so much!’ 2D is sobbing when Murdoc manages to sort out the various heartbeats and rustling fabrics and wails.

Noodle is gripping 2D’s neck so tight it’s a wonder she isn’t choking him. They’re both sobbing over Murdoc’s head. He stands there with his hands gripping Noodle’s thighs to hold her steady. 2D somehow manages to keep the three of them upright.

‘What happened to you?’ 2D asks as he slowly lets them go. His fingers linger, too-long and sun-warm, on Murdoc’s bare arms for only a second longer than they should, but though the electric spark sends shocks clear up his arm, he seems reluctant to let go, as though terrified.

From this distance, Murdoc can see the wires holding 2D’s teeth in. Good, he doesn’t have to punch them out. They’re just dentures. That’s fine.

He’s too caught up in the lack of a gap in his singer’s teeth that he forgets to answer the question.

2D hesitates, steps back. Wraps his arms around himself.

‘We buried you,’ he whispers, and Murdoc stares at his mouth. It’s safer than meeting his eyes. ‘Me an’ Russ. We buried you, Muds. We fucking. We put you in the dirt.’

In the silence that falls between them, someone makes a comment about the inverted cross emblazoned in black across Murdoc’s bicep. Noodle, still draped across his back with her chin on his crown, hisses like a cat.

Murdoc doesn’t hear her. 2D’s gaze flickers up, trapped-rabbit. She tugs Murdoc’s ear.

He remembers to breathe.

2D visibly relaxes. Just a little. But visible. A slouch in his shoulders just low enough to reinforce that lanky stretch of his neck.

Murdoc looks for a love bite. He doesn’t see one. His gut aches. A shadow passes behind 2D, darker than black and taller than any living man, creeping. The sun goes behind a cloud; spidery fingers wrap around 2D’s throat. Red glints behind him, the spark of metal in the sun.

The world slows to a crawl, and Murdoc knows this particular taste of fear on his tongue. Whatever was following them in England, traipsing after them as they made their way across the country, it followed them here too. Come out of the shadows to remind him that he is not free.

‘We’re leaving,’ he manages to choke out around the lump in his throat. ‘You’re coming. Pack your bags.’

2D looks at him, flicks his eyes over his face.

‘You’re going green,’ Noodle whispers against the shell of his ear, her breath somehow cooler than the heat of the still air around them.

The sun comes out from behind the cloud, and 2D’s throat is freed, the shadows shortening to glimmers of grey English skies.

He shakes himself back to death-pallor. Noodle spits out some of his hair.

Her boys stare at each other for several long, terrible moments, awkward and too-tense, and then 2D nods, tells them to follow him.

Noodle wriggles free of Murdoc’s grip and hurries ahead to walk alongside 2D, her hand slotting into his, swinging a little, like it used to when they – the band, all together, a happy family of convicts and the damaged and the haunted – used to go out for the weekly shop, or to buy Noodle more clothes, because Christ above the girl grew quick. He trails behind, keeping them in arm’s reach, watching their backs, their shadows, watches for glimpses of blacker-than-black and post-box-red. After a minute or two, he reaches out and yanks the skirt of Noodle’s dress lower. She glances over her shoulder at him, and gives him a beaming grin.

After winding through several streets, 2D leads them up a set of steps and into a block of flats several stories higher than Murdoc thinks he has ever seen. 2D, naturally, lives on the highest floor. Biting his tongue and tasting blood, Murdoc keeps thoughts of it being the furthest to fall to himself. It’s a small, pokey little apartment. Noodle delights in it, comparing it to the capsule hotel she stayed in. Her first concern is making sure 2D’s fridge contains everything she feels he should have in there, though Murdoc suspects this is more for her to get decent food than it is concern for 2D’s health. They haven’t eaten right in days, Murdoc having not eaten at all.

 He peers over her shoulder at the food.

‘Are you eating that?’ he asks, giving 2D a sidelong glance.

Levelling a look, 2D shoves his arm out, wordlessly. He’s flushing a little, but he accepts the doubt being aimed at him, given his track record with things like food.

Murdoc wraps his fingers around 2D’s bicep, the way he had done for months after they moved into Kong, measuring the width. It had, admittedly, started as a request from his mother, to keep track of his health following the coma. Then, somehow, the chore had become a habit, and Murdoc had become invested in checking 2D’s weight. His arm has more fat on it than it did last time he felt it; his thumb and middle finger don’t touch, a good inch or so between them. This is enough of an improvement for him, and he grunts, pulls a beer from the fridge, and shuts it.

Now that Noodle is assured of her not-brother’s health, she asks about the bathroom, and clean, running water. 2D points at a shut door. She disappears inside, and very firmly locks the door behind her.

Murdoc waits until he hears water running before slamming the bottle onto the counter and backing 2D into a wall. The bastard is still so tall, but his slouch is returning, bringing him down close enough to meet Murdoc’s eyes without heads tilting.

‘Look,’ he says, quiet, not meeting 2D’s eyes, or his face in general.

He’s pressed so close that 2D can feel the rapid beat of his heart against his chest, count every fleck of grey in his hair, see the faintest tremor in his hand as it rests next to his head, knuckles pressed into the plaster, but it’s not a fist. 2D thinks about gorillas, the monkeys, not their band. Is that why Murdoc chose the name?

2D looks where Murdoc is looking, but sees nothing except the same four walls and standard-issue paintings.

‘Promise me you won’t ever leave my sight,’ Murdoc whispers. ‘Facea – ‘D, Stuart. Promise me.’

2D stares at him. Murdoc glares into a darkened corner of the room, but though his face is turned away, his head is angled enough that 2D can still see his eye. Though he isn’t looking, he keeps 2D trapped in place, knuckles pressed, weight-bearing, against the wall. His other hand is clenched into a tight fist at his side.

He panics. Murdoc has not called him names or hit him this entire time. Now he’s asking something 2D hasn’t heard anyone ask him since his dad took him to Clacton Pier in ‘85.

So he laughs and laughs and laughs, and says, ‘you’re not scared I’m gonna die on you, are you? Ha-ha-ha, don’t be silly! Ha-ha.’

Murdoc says nothing. The tendons and veins in his neck stand sharp as his jaw tightens, his bottom lip bitten but still trembling. Then he swallows, and his neck relaxes. They both take a shuddering breath or three.

‘I’m not going to die,’ 2D promises, quieter now, frowning as he watches Murdoc’s gaze flick, agitated and _bothered_ , across the room, lingering on every dark corner and black shadow, ‘I mean. I don’t mean to, and if I do, it’s an accident, right? An’ – an’ you got Noodle back, yeah? You can – can – you can come and get me, too!’

At this Murdoc laughs. It’s not a very nice laugh, but his laughter has never been very nice. ‘No, pet. No, I can’t. I can get into Hell no problem.’

2D doesn’t get it. He tells Murdoc this. ‘I don’t get it? I mean, I’ll just wait by the door, it’ll be fine! You always tell me to wait at the door when I get lost. So I’ll just wait. You’ll find me.’

The faith the boy has in him is astounding. It makes his throat tighten. He looks up at him – finally, finally, 2D thinks. Not being looked at was almost worse than the staring had been – stricken, the expression so unfamiliar and so _sad_ that 2D feels his chest ache. His throat burns, his eyes sting.

‘I ain’t gonna follow you,’ Murdoc whispers, and he sounds so tense, so strange, like there’s something lodged in his throat. ‘I can’t.’

He looks like he’s going to be sick.

Quieter still, he adds, ‘not where you’re going.’

The bathroom door opens, and Murdoc steps back, still looking sick. Noodle looks at him. He shoulders past her and slams the bathroom door hard enough to rattle the Monet on the wall.

2D waits as long as he can, but hours pass, and his bladder hurts, and he tries the door. Unlocked. So he enters, and peeks around the door to find Murdoc crouched behind it, head between his knees and arms folded over the top. His fingers dig into his arms, sun-red skin scraped white by the pressure.

‘Murdoc? What, um, what are you – you okay?’

In the broken fluorescent strip light above their heads, he seems to flicker, in and out of reality like some kind of horror movie. A chill crawls along 2D’s spine, and his fingers itch. A pain begins creeping up after that chill, settling behind his eyes. He hasn’t had a migraine for months. Over a year. Murdoc is green and grey and then not anything at all. And then he settles, his skin flushing a little, back to that familiar pallor, and he shoves himself upright. There’s no trace of emotion on his face. His eyes look sore, red and wet and sticky. 2D wonders how long conjunctivitis lasts.

‘I’m fine,’ he says, with a resolute nod, a firm tone.

Then he’s gone, leaving 2D alone with his full bladder and a throbbing pain creeping into that one corner of his eye.

They leave in the sundown chill, 2D taking as little as he cares to take. They’ve lived on nothing before, haven’t they, they can do it again. Noodle seems fascinated by 2D’s possessions, the things he’s accumulated. Murdoc watches with an amused crook to a brow as 2D shoves almost everything he owns into two suitcases. Clothes, books, shoes. Watches, CDs, a collection of toiletries. Murdoc catches a glint of burnished gold between folds of a T-shirt, but it’s gone before he can see what 2D wasted money on this time. A stack of DVDs almost fill an entire suitcase. Murdoc almost tells his singer to make a list of the bloody things and they’ll get replacements back in England, but he’s seen 2D’s handwriting – and spelling – and decides against it for his own sanity later.

Noodle clings to Murdoc’s hand as they leave, 2D taking one last glance at the place he’d lived for the last year or so. Another chapter of his life has closed, but another is opening, and he’s eager to see, to retread a forgotten path.

The streets are still heaving, nightlife and the closing-up of the market keeping the streets thick enough to hide them. A young girl recognises them, or recognises Murdoc, who is, despite the greenish, sickly tint to his skin and the hollowness to his cheeks, the only one who still looks like he does on the posters.

Noodle and 2D share a glance as Murdoc brushes straight past her fumbled attempts to ask for an autograph, tugging Noodle along behind him. Before Hell, Murdoc would have stopped and preened and made a great big song-and-dance. But now he is ignoring everything except his goal, which they’re assuming is the airport he and Noodle arrived in.

They make a quick pit-stop, and Murdoc disappears into a parking lot, returning with a car. Noodle frowns at him. He pointedly ignores her, and tells them to get in. They get in, 2D’s suitcases in the boot, and the younger band members in the back seat. He says nothing, and they say nothing in return.

In the car, whilst Murdoc grumbles to himself about how he hates hot places and why does 2D always seem to end up in sandy, shitty hellholes when rainy old Blighty is _so much better_ , Christ alive, 2D, Noodle sprawls across the backseat with her head in 2D’s lap. He pets her hair, absent, finds his fingers measuring the proportions of her face as she dozes.

She’s grown so much.

They drive across long, congested highways towards the airport. Murdoc said something about a private plane, but 2D hadn’t been listening, he’d been too busy looking.

‘Murdoc?’ he whispers, and immediately hopes he hasn’t been heard.

Glancing up from the depressingly beige-and-headlight view out of the windscreen, Murdoc meets his eyes in the rear-view. 2D meets them as strong as he dares. He barely manages to hold it for a second before flinching and ducking his head.

‘You’ve changed,’ he mumbles, and Murdoc snorts.

‘Been to Hell,’ he says with a shrug too idle to be nonchalant. ‘Changes you.’

2D gnaws at his lip; he’d taken the dentures out, and it feels better to gnaw with his canines and premolars.

‘You don’t have the red eye anymore,’ he tries instead.

Their eyes meet again. A car flashes past, hits Murdoc’s eye with the headlights just enough to make it flash gold. It passes in the same second. Both eyes turn black once more.

‘I’ve still got conjunctivitis from all that dirt,’ he scoffs, looks at the road.

It wasn’t that noticeable. 2D never really _notices_ though. That’s how Murdoc liked him best. Just going with it. Not really asking questions.

‘Been a while since you went without sleeves,’ he offers. Third time’s a charm.

‘Yes, well. It’s too bloody hot.’

He’s still sleeveless, in that same torn-shouldered tank top he’d been wearing since he dug himself out of his grave, not that 2D knows that, the one that shows off the tattoos on his arm, just enough hair to show that there _is_ hair. By the time they’re on the plane, it’ll be long sleeves again. 2D almost decides to savour the occasion.

Murdoc cracks his neck. The sound echoes through the car. 2D flinches. They crawl through the traffic in silence for another hour.

‘I kinda miss the red eye, y’know?’ 2D says.

Murdoc snorts.

‘You look.’ 2D pauses, considers his words. Murdoc shoots him a warning glare in the rear-view. 2D flinches, but doesn’t back down. ‘You don’t look as old as I thought you would.’

‘Eh?’

‘I mean, it’s been. It’s been a long time.’

Murdoc pauses. 2D watches his face shift in the lights, the tug of a frown forming a crease between crooked eyebrows. He looks old in that moment, more than his years should be. 2D is reminded of the man he was when they met, properly, in that Tesco car park with smoke still coming off the wheels of the Astra. Early-thirties, still unable to grow a beard, still with that just-too-long haircut. He’d looked good then. But something is wrong now.

Little things. 2D is good at the little things.

‘It’s been two years,’ 2D says, quiet.

‘Two years,’ Murdoc repeats.

2D nods, harried jerks of his chin, and Murdoc runs a scabby-knuckled hand down his face.

‘Fuck me.’

They’re quiet for a while. 2D watches Noodle sleeping. Murdoc drives in a daze, cuts across lanes and commits enough offences to be arrested three times over by the time they reach the airport, but 2D is too used to the madman’s driving to even worry.

‘I’m supposed to be forty-two,’ Murdoc murmurs, ducking into the backseat to peel Noodle out of 2D’s lap and heft her onto his back. ‘Forty-fucking-two. Where did my life go? I was supposed to be a superstar.’

‘You look about thirty-five,’ 2D smiles, and tumbles out of the car. He doesn’t comment on the whole superstar thing. He’d thought they _were_ superstars, and Murdoc had gone out in a blaze of glory, after all.

Murdoc asks if he’s alright with his shit.

2D grabs his suitcases, and hauls them as quickly as he can. He has longer legs than Murdoc, always has, but the man’s on a mission, and it’s hard to keep up.

‘What about the car?’

‘Oh, fuck the car. Stole it anyway.’

Of course he did.

 

**+++**

 

On the plane, Noodle finds a handheld game console, shoves earbuds in, and sprawls across 2D’s lap to play her game.

Murdoc sprawls on the other bench, limbs akimbo, an arm over his eyes. 2D thinks he’s gone to sleep.

‘I barely remember the red eye,’ Murdoc says eventually.

2D jumps; he’d been watching Noodle’s attempts to catch a blue blob thing. He looks up to find that Murdoc hasn’t moved.

‘Your left,’ 2D says, taps his own. The dark circles under it aren’t as sore as usual. ‘I used to think it was a – a con – contact.’

Murdoc lifts his arm to peer at him with one eye. 2D catches the flash of tentacles coiling around his inner arm, a flash of an empty eye peeking at him from the shadows. He shudders.

‘I’ll buy a contact,’ he promises, and drops his arm again. ‘Like the fake teeth.’

2D is about to open his mouth.

‘The fangs,’ Murdoc interrupts before he has chance to explain the dentures, still in the flat he abandoned. ‘Back in two-thousand.’

2D has not really considered Murdoc’s teeth. His eye was more important. In the harsh overhead lighting of the plane, he can see, when Murdoc’s arm moves, what he means about the conjunctivitis. It must be quite painful. But when Murdoc opens his mouth next to groan and shift, 2D looks.

‘Then,’ he starts, and taps at his own crooked and missing chompers. ‘They’re real now?’

Murdoc gives him a lazy, half-hearted thumbs up and rolls over, back to him. His shirt rides; the elaborate P R I D E tattooed on the back of his hip peeks through in a brilliant shade of red on the sheet-white of his skin.

Pride. Of course.

He tries to watch Noodle play her game, but his eyes keep drifting back to where Murdoc is sprawled across the way, his hip hitched and his waist curving more than 2D has seen it curve. He looks more underfed than he ever has. 2D supposes this is because he’s been dead for two years. It’s hard to look good when you’re dead.

Gaze turned back down to Noodle’s screen, he misses the moment Murdoc slips from doze to sleep, but when he looks up again, the older man’s body is totally still. There’s no rise-and-fall at all, just still-and-still. 2D watches, and his pulse climbs, a heavy drum against his ribs. Russel has broken his sticks before, but 2D is sure this hurts more.

‘Check his pulse,’ Noodle whispers. ‘He stops breathing sometimes. I don’t think he needs to.’

2D slides out from beneath her and creeps across the few feet. His shadow stretches long against the far side of the plane, a hunched, long-fingered monster. It startles him, and he almost falls. _Nosferatu_ , he thinks as he calms down, that old black and white film Murdoc loves. It’s the only one they can watch together without him complaining.

Murdoc’s pulse is slow, but steady under his fingers. He’s sure his hands are cold, but his – his – his friend doesn’t react the way he would have back at Kong, back in the beginning. He doesn’t grab his wrist and hiss and snarl and curse. He just lies there, sleeping like the dead, 2D’s fingers on his neck.

Sleeping like the dead.

2D stumbles back to his seat, and collapses into it with a choked sob. Noodle presses into his side, wriggling to fit under his arm and wraps hers around him, her legs over his lap. They sit like that for the rest of the ride, both watching Murdoc’s still, definitely-not-breathing sleeping body.

 They land in Stansted. Murdoc had wanted them closer to Kong, but their pilot is some by-the-book chap who, Noodle tells 2D in a whispered tone, has been more trouble than he was worth. Murdoc paid a fortune though she has no idea where that fortune came from because he tried to access his bank account, and it kicked him out, and she says he suspects they’ve – the police – have burnt everything. 2D tries to assure her this is not the case, but cannot find the words.

2D grabs his suitcases, and they make their way through customs. One of the guards recognises Murdoc, recognises the black-eyed and toothless lanky giant with him, though the hair’s different, sees the Japanese girl sticking close to his side and assumes, based on dates and presented evidence.

‘Hey, man!’ he says, as he lets them through. ‘I thought you were dead.’

‘All part of the show,’ Murdoc gives him, and slaps 2D in the back to make him keep moving. Noodle hurries after them and takes one of 2D’s cases. It means they walk faster, and Murdoc’s knuckles are pulling tight with every step.

‘I thought you liked being famous,’ 2D says, glancing across at him.

Murdoc shoves the glass doors to the lobby open, smashing it against the wall and cracking the glass. Security makes noise, but he ignores them and marches on.

‘I do like being famous,’ he replies, and gives 2D a shaky, but present smile, enough to pacify him. ‘I’ve been dead for two years. Forgot how clingy they were, ‘s all. Takes a bit.’

2D accepts this, and says that’s why he got dentures and dyed his hair.

‘Yes,’ Murdoc sniffs, ‘well. We’ll have to do something about that. No singer of mine is having brown hair. What a disgrace to the _Gorillaz_ name.’

Content with this, 2D ambles along without further question or complaint. They leave the airport, all three of them breathing in God-blessed English smog, and take a moment to admire the grey clouds forming overhead.

2D keeps eyeing him, and though Murdoc makes every attempt to glare at the daft sod, he has to watch where he’s going. There are cracks in the pavement fucking _everywhere_ and he can’t be tripping over them. His reputation, from what he understands, is in shambles, dismembered by the press post-mortem, but he has to preserve the last of it.

(Were the press actually allowed to get their hands on his criminal record? Because he isn’t sure they are, but it hasn’t seemed to stop them, given the way a woman he half-remembers from a night that was too-dark and too-drunk looks at him.)

Without a word, 2D falls into stride beside him and takes his hand. Murdoc glances at it. Doesn’t move it. Matches the grip.

The three of them walk in silence for several more streets before Murdoc finally manages to focus on street names and tugs them onto the road back to Kong.

2D does not think Murdoc _remembers_ Kong, remembers the way he died. They’ve not talked about it, but the way he walks suggests he expects nothing less than to see their home base as he last left it.

Noodle won’t let Murdoc steal another car, because Noodle is a killjoy. He elects to ignore her and steals one anyway. 2D is the only of them with legal money now, but no one in their right mind would let him drive. (Murdoc, for a joke, has him listed as legally blind, and 2D has made no attempts to change this, even though he can quite clearly see.) Sat beside Murdoc with Noodle pouting and huffing in the backseat, they drive the last way to their house on the hill, their rising sun, and 2D watches Murdoc’s eyelids grow heavy, his blinks slower and slower until he’s barely keeping his eyes open.

They drive under a tree, and he snaps awake once more, puts a white-knuckle grip on the gearstick. 2D’s fingers itch to rub the jutting bones. He traps those itching fingers between his knees, not trusting either them, or those white knuckles.

‘You know,’ 2D murmurs, and Murdoc glances over at him. ‘I, um. I. It was funny, y’know? There was a. The fire. The fire at Kong, it.’

Murdoc has five names and a dozen ways of telling him to hurry up on his tongue, ready to be spat out, but he bites, gentle to not bite it _off_ , and waits, alternating between watching him and the road. 2D puzzles over how to explain, fiddling with his fingers, picking at his nails and scratching sun-dry spots between his knuckles.

‘The camper survived,’ he murmurs, eventually, and Murdoc grunts. ‘It got impounded by the police, but they let me keep everything in there, once they were. Done? With it. They gave me everything, I think. I didn’t. I don’t really understand.’

‘You were the last one standing,’ Murdoc sniffs, in the sort of tone that outright says, rather than implies, that he’d not thought that this would be the case. ‘You were the only one to give it to. I disowned my father and brother as soon as I realised I had you lot.’

2D stares blankly, 8-balls looking a little more bloody than normal. Sometimes, Murdoc thinks he used to be able to see a bit of blue poking through the black, but no. No, it’s just black voids of utter vacancy.

‘I listed you as my next-of-kin,’ he says, quiet, and changes gear. ‘I wanted to. To. I don’t know. I figured, if anything happened to me. I wanted you to have all my shit. I knew you’d appreciate it most, and do what was right by it.’

‘El Diablo survived,’ 2D blurts out then, and Murdoc gapes.

‘You what?’

‘It survived. The police don’t know why, but it survived the fire, and I have it in storage. I didn’t. I didn’t take any of your things with me. But I kept them all.’

Murdoc knows 2D well enough, likes to think he does, to know when he’s lying. He’s always been awful at it, from what his mother said. A sweet boy, but positively _thick_.

‘I see,’ Murdoc says, and wonders if he cares at all.

Does he _need_ the Devil’s guitar? A bass guitar is a bass guitar, and he’s played others before, and since, being in possession of it. He can play any guitar, and they’re good musicians, all of them. They don’t need the devil’s help. Not anymore.

He thinks about the fingers around 2D’s throat, the post-box-red and darker-than-black.

‘Should I not have?’ 2D asks, and Murdoc starts out of his contemplation.

‘Thank you,’ he says, genuinely. ‘It was great of you. Nice.’

2D flushes, and his hands settle nice and calm in his lap. He turns to look out of the window, done with the conversation now that Murdoc is happy.

And he _is_ happy. 2D was lying about keeping or not keeping something, but his shit is in storage. That is half the battle already. They aren’t starting from nothing.

‘They should have transferred all of my money to you as well,’ he says, ‘or at least given you access to the account.’

He doesn’t expect much from Barclays though. They didn’t let him cash that cheque from the record deal.

2D nods. ‘They did. But I don’t understand that kind of thing! You and Russ always dealt with it, so I just. I left it. The account’s still open and that. But I ain’t touched it.’

‘Russel has Noodle’s account,’ Murdoc murmurs, and wonders how that’s going to work.

He has no idea where the daft bastard is. He’d tried to find him, but the man did not want to be found. 2D had been easy, Murdoc had found him after only hours, but Russel was an enigma. It wouldn’t be a surprise if he’d gone and got himself a new ghost or a demon, dropping him out of Murdoc’s line of sight.

2D nods quietly, and twists in his seat to see Noodle playing on her game again, earbuds in, the tinny music blaring too loud. It’s a wonder they aren’t all half-deaf with how loud they play audio.

‘Did you look at it?’ 2D asks. ‘Your account, I mean.’

Murdoc shrugs. ‘Before this? Not really. Had no need to. Can’t access it now. Tried, though.’

‘You were a multi-millionaire.’

He considers this number. These numbers. The multiple zeros. He thinks long and hard about them. He glances at the dimple in Noodle’s knee, just visible in the rear-view. He can see her foot bobbing in the wing-mirror.

‘So?’

2D hums to himself, as though deep in thought, and frowns out of the window for the remainder of the journey.

They arrive at the remnants of Kong late in the evening. Murdoc had forgotten what it smelt like, the stink of the landfill and the bodies, and now, the burnt smell of stone and wood and metal. The place had been falling apart long before the demons came, but it’s totally collapsed now. Maybe two walls are more than rubble, and there isn’t anything to suggest it was their place.

He feels a pang of sadness; he spent a long time working on that place, getting it to something liveable, something nice. He hadn’t planned to _stay_ , not forever. But it was a nice thing to have. Something that was his.

Still. Onward to better and brighter things.

 ‘What are we going to do?’ 2D asks. He is clinging to Murdoc’s hand again, a little more desperately than when Murdoc was trying not to trip over his own feet.

Noodle is holding 2D’s.

It’s oddly fitting.

‘We’re going to find Russel,’ Noodle says, too loud. ‘Right?’

They both look at Murdoc, who is somewhere between green and death, and 2D squeezes his fingers as tight as he dares. Murdoc shudders back to normal, and breathes deep. He’d stopped, then. They hadn’t noticed.

‘Yeah,’ he breathes. ‘Yeah, we’re gonna find him. Then we’ll get ourselves new digs, and we’ll start from scratch. A new album. Something bigger than before. Best _Gorillaz_ album yet!’

2D grins at him. Noodle beams from just behind 2D’s arm.

He smiles back.

 

**\- E N D -**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Chapter title from Clint Eastwood.  
> \- I don’t know what it is about it, but Head and Shoulders is literally the quickest way to strip dye from your hair. I get hair dye out in like, two or so washes.   
> \- I have it on good authority that hitting someone with a peach, especially when it’s been in the fridge, hurts like shit. Don’t try it at home, kids.  
> \- The inverted cross and the octopus are both tattooed on Murdoc’s right arm (inverted cross is seen on a Making Music mag cover, and the octopus can be seen in one of the pictures in Rise of the Ogre. The seven sins are also canon.  
> \- Murdoc sees the boogieman behind 2D.  
> \- The burnished gold is, of course, Murdoc’s cross.  
> \- Noodle is trying to catch a shiny Ditto.  
> \- Clacton Pier is an amusement park and arcade in Essex. During the 80’s, it wasn’t great.  
> -Everyone I know who has a Barclays account complains about them, it’s quite entertaining. And the giant cheque is mentioned in Rise of the Ogre.  
> -Thanks for reading, lovelies!


End file.
